


guess we're just at the mercy of the way that we feel (wish it were true love)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Hanahaki Disease, Sickness Mention, and that's a tall order, because it's so strong in the first half that i made myself cry, blood mention, can you SMELL the projection, oof, that's why the rating is the way it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23119966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: She has a wicked coughing fit that night, goes and sticks her head outside of the dome to try and keep from waking anyone else up.She thinks about it, about Fjord making the horses go so she has to run to catch up, Molly laughing when he’d successfully pissed her off.That’s love, she thinks, that’s what love looks like. Just gotta learn to see it, and then she coughs up blood.And if Jester does that, too, forgets, well, she won’t blame her.(a hanahaki au, of sorts)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Clara Lionett, Beauregard Lionett & Mollymauk Tealeaf, Beauregard Lionett & The Mighty Nein, Beauregard Lionett & Thoreau Lionett, Fjord & Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 12
Kudos: 250





	guess we're just at the mercy of the way that we feel (wish it were true love)

**Author's Note:**

> title's from spring by angel olsen
> 
> (i wish i had more to say about it but i'm relistening to the kung fu panda soundtrack and thinking about that instead right now)
> 
> this is basically a reimagining of how hanahaki disease works-- not as a pure product of unrequited love, but more like chicken pox and shingles, where previously neglected people, especially as kids, are susceptible later in life. it's also me projecting onto beau, but, like, that's not new.

Here’s the thing, right, there are illnesses you can only get if you’ve had a different form of them before.

They sit in you, after you deal with them the first time, after you crest that hill. Your fever breaks, you get up again, and you take solace in the funny knack bodies have for surviving, for healing.

Then, a couple years down the line— a couple decades, if you’re lucky— something happens. You have a bad week, a bad month, and it’s like it never left you.

—

“Beauregard.”

She doesn’t move.

“Beauregard.”

Doesn’t need to— she’ll open it herself, in a moment or two— just more efficient, really.

“I’m coming in.”

Mom opens the door and just stands there for a long moment. She doesn’t turn around, even, just keeps staring at the wall like she’s actually been sulking this whole time. She’s learning how to hold it over her.

“I'm sorry.”

She says nothing.

“Do you have anything to say to me?”

The floorboards press down as Mom approaches the bed, sits on the edge.

“It’s rude not to look at someone while they’re talking to you, Beauregard.”

She starts crying before she turns around, hot silent tears, knows it’ll throw Mom off. She’s learning that Mom doesn’t prepare for her to actually feel something when she speaks to her— at least, not anything she doesn’t want her to feel.

“I— I said I was sorry, Beauregard—“ Panic twists on her face, panic and fear. She reaches out and thinks better of it. “But it’s not all my fault. If you’d have just been ready in time, I wouldn’t have to yell. You know I just want you to be ready so you don’t make your father angry, you know that. I don’t want him to be angry at you.”

 _Then why don’t you do anything when he is_ , she doesn’t say.

( _H_ _e said he wanted a son. Don’t you care?_ )

“Can you say you’re sorry?” Mom asks, voice gentle for the first time.

“‘M sorry.” It feels torn from her before it’s fully grown. Before she has a chance to feel it.

“There we go. May I have a hug?”

She buries her face in Mom’s shirt, tears fast and hot.

 _This is the worst part_ , she thinks. Because it means they’re done talking about it.

—

“I knew this was all you would ever do,” Thoreau Lionett says. “We tried so hard with you, and you still did this to us.”

She stares at him as the Crownsguard goes and gets the keys for her manacles. She can feel a bead of blood tracking down her forehead, cool, and soaks in the sensation of it like it has any of the catharsis of crying.

 _I wanted to travel,_ she thinks, _for you. I wanted to take some bottles from that good year to Zadash, where they have the big Harvest Close market. Maybe I’d even make it to Rexxentrum. I’m not the one who said no._

 _Didn’t you give up trying, she thinks,_ _when I wasn’t a boy? Didn’t you give up before I could even try?_

“Yeah,” she says instead. “Looks like you were right.”

The Crownsguard takes her manacles off with the glassy sound of grainy metal on grainy metal. She bends her hands at the wrist one way, and then the other, the crack of joints orphic and loud in the quiet hall.

“Get your things,” Dad says, almost spits. “We’re going home,” and he says _home_ like the definition doesn’t quite reach all the way to her.

 _He’s always said it like that,_ she thinks, _like she’s the one who made it that way._

_I wanted to make you rich. I wanted to make you proud._

Her chest hurts.

—

“Wow, you really let him get to you, huh?”

The sand pit monitor bends down to look her in the eyes, squinting. There’s a smirk curling at the edge of her mouth, like it’s funny.

“No,” she says, because her tone makes it sound like she shouldn’t have.

“Kid, he’s gone. It’s just you, now, just you and me. Doesn’t matter why you’re here. You have the chance to make something out of it, if you let it go.”

It sounds nice when she says it. Like it’s something she could do.

“Alright—” and the monitor cracks her neck. Blocks her face with her forearms. “Let’s go again.”

 _Let go,_ she thinks, and doesn’t.

She sees her moment coming like it’s brought to her by the gods, sweeps the monitor’s leg and sends her flat on her back in the sand.

She struggles to her feet. “See, there you go. Just gotta let go.”

“Yup,” Beau says, and gives the monitor a hand, and doesn’t tell her that she can taste blood because she bit down on her tongue.

—

“Jeez,” Fjord says. “So sensitive,” and she wants to fucking punch him.

He’s still smiling like it doesn’t mean anything, like the sound of it isn’t like teeth in her.

She can feel it in her, the urge to cry. Tries to think about making her mind go blank— _It doesn’t matter what it is,_ they always say, _your response can always be controlled. It doesn’t matter why you’re upset, because you can choose not to be._

 _(Fjord and Jester, they think she’s a monk. She’s a monk, right? Did all the training, and stuff, but that’s, like, one of their whole things. How making your mind go blank is supposed to let you see more clearly, how it can heal you, and she’s never felt that, not once. It’s just something wrong with her, right, it’s gotta be?_ )

Then, something funny happens. The lump in her throat, that tickly herald of angry tears, it turns into a rasp, and she starts to cough.

“Beau?” Jester asks, from up ahead. “You okay?”

She doubles back and rubs her hands together until they glow, round face scrunched with worry, and the itch in her throat subsides, leaving only the ghost of an ache.

“Yup,” she says. “Just fine, Jessie. Don’t waste your spells.”

Fjord looks worried, too, when she glances over at him, but then Jester bumps into her with a shoulder.

“Beau,” she says, like it’s obvious. “It wouldn’t be a waste.”

 _No?_ she almost says, almost lets it slip that she really isn’t sure it wouldn’t be, and doesn’t.

—

“I’m sorry, Beau.”

“Pretty sure I should be sayin’ that to you, Jes.”

They’re curled in the belly of the cart together, towards the back. Further up, Caleb and Nott are dozing, totally spent, and Fjord’s sharing the driver’s seat with Mr. Clay, their words blurred together in a low, gravelly buzz.

“It’s not your fault, Beau,” Jester says, even though tears are sliding down her face sideways, getting lost in her hair and falling into her mouth. “It’s not anyone’s fault.”

“Yeah,” she says, and reaches for Jester’s hands. “I’m still sorry, though. How come you’re sorry?”

Jester looks right in her eyes. “Molly loved you a lot.”

“Oh—” and her throat winds shut. “You think so?”

“I _know_ so, Beau.”

She doesn’t speak for a moment. Doesn’t want to speak badly of the dead, but she’s the least afraid of saying it to Jester:

“Maybe he should’ve said it once or twice.”

Jester’s eyebrows scrunch further together— not really a frown, just concern.

“I think he thought you’d see it.”

“Yeah,” and she’s crying, too, now. “I wish I did.”

“It’s not your fault you didn’t— he could be pretty mean. People don’t always know how to show it so other people can see it, you know? But he did.”

She doesn’t say anything, just pulls Jester’s hands a little closer to herself.

“It’s not your fault you don’t think it’s love when someone’s mean to you, Beau.”

“I—”

“I can tell, you know. I wish Fjord could. He wouldn’t give you such a hard time if he knew it hurt you like that.”

Jester wriggles closer so she can wrap her arms around Beau.

“I won’t ever do that, I promise.”

“Okay,” she says into the crown of Jester’s head, and falls asleep like that.

—

She has a wicked coughing fit that night, goes and sticks her head outside of the dome to try and keep from waking anyone else up.

She thinks about it, about Fjord making the horses go so she has to run to catch up, Molly laughing when he’d successfully pissed her off.

 _That’s love,_ she thinks, _that’s what love looks like. Just gotta learn to see it,_ and then she coughs up blood.

And if Jester does that, too, forgets, well, _she won’t blame her._

—

She gets used to it.

Maybe it’s because she didn’t have siblings, you know? From what Caduceus says, she thinks, that’s just how siblings are. They love each other without saying it. Maybe if she’d had one— if her parents had had the son they wanted earlier, when she was still around, maybe she’d get it.

Fjord lets up, a little. She hopes Jester didn’t talk to him about it— doesn’t want to miss out on any of it— if this is the kind of love Fjord wants to give, then she wants to soak it in like flowers in summer, wants to know that it’s all around her, that it’s for her, even if it aches at first. She didn’t get the chance with Molly, so she’ll take it now.

He calls her his first mate and she knows she’s doing better.

Caleb is easier— she thinks they might be the same way. They can practice with each other. She hauls him up after a nasty fight, while flames are still licking up the grass where bodies have fallen, and thinks of the little boy in the Lionett manor, thinks of holding him up, over her head, where Mom and Dad can’t reach.

(Nott, though, is gonna take some time. she still can’t really tell if Nott thinks she’s good for anything other than watching out for Caleb. And, well, maybe she isn’t, but at least she’ll be damn good at that.)

And Jester hasn’t broken her promise, yet. She even tells Nott off, calls Beau pretty and smiles like it’s easy, like she believes it, like she knows how it makes her feel.

If she’d had to place bets on which would stop, Jester wanting to be her roommate or Jester talking about Fjord, Beau never would have bet on herself, but somehow that’s sort of just how it turns out— Jester says she loves her, on the deck, in the rain, and asks her about Nott and Yeza and blushes furiously, and _Tusk Love_ never comes back out of her haversack. The first time they meet Marion Lavorre she eyes Fjord up and down so fiercely Beau wonders just how many messages Jester’s sent to her about him, but the second time they visit it almost feels like she turns that gaze on Beau.

 _Wishful thinking,_ she chalks it, shakes off the thought and heads down the hall to Jester’s room.

—

She gets sick when they go to Kamordah.

She wants Mom and Dad to be like she remembered— it’d be easy, right, then, to just give up on them. To throw herself the rest of the way into these new people, and learning how to learn how they love her.

Mom’s what she expects, at first— she holds it like a shield, Dad being awful, like it’s a burden only she’s got to carry, like she doesn’t have another entire person to care for. She’s so surprised they’d even told TJ about her that she starts crying when he runs to her.

She plans what she’ll say to Mom on their way out— she’ll turn to Mom and say that _she had better do more to make sure TJ’s okay than she had with Beau, because maybe she’s not what they wanted, but he is, and they should at least care for the things they wanted._

But then Dad goes and says all the shit he never seemed to be able to when she needed it. Says he’s proud of her like she’d gone off to school, like it had been her choice. Like that’s what she meant to do, to make him proud.

For a moment, she almost wonders if maybe it was.

He says she wouldn’t come home just to see them like it’s funny, like it’s something mutually understood. Like she’d chosen to leave— and she only pauses because the way he says it almost, almost reminds her of Fjord, saying something that he knows will get to her because it’s a sign that he _knows_ her, and there’s another moment where she wonders, again, if she’s been wrong. If that’s what it was.

But then Jester pulls her aside.

—

She loves Jester— don’t tell Nott, she’s sunk on her so far the fishhook feels like just another part of her mouth— and she knows Jester’s right, but it’s funny, she tells her almost exactly what the Cobalt Soul used to, and it’s like ice water down her spine.

 _(Beauregard,_ Dairon tells her, _I think the Soul has taught you that anger is wrong._

 _Isn’t it, though,_ she says, and ducks both of Dairon’s fists, _makes you sloppy and all that?_

_Anger can make you sloppy, yes. It can be fleeting, and can lead you astray when you mistake it for strength. But anger is not wrong._

They catch Beau’s fists, one in each hand, easy because Beau feels the fight, the fire draining out of her.

 _Anger is what you feel, Beau,_ she says. _No one can tell you that what you feel is wrong._

Beau cries in the makeshift training pit and Dairon lets her.)

“Yeah,” she says to Jester, “okay,” and for the first time in months, feels the urge to cough.

—

It gets worse all the way to the witch’s hut, this feeling of something growing. Like when Caduceus casts that funny spell he has and mushrooms sprout in seconds, not days— natural, but unnatural, that’s what it’s like.

She thinks Isharnai can see it in her, whatever it is— her eyes from under the snarly curtains of hair glitter like Nott’s used to, like she’s seized on something precious.

And, well, whatever’s precious to her can’t be good for Beau.

When she thinks Jester gave her something in kind, it crawls up almost to her throat and she starts wheezing— _she should have done it,_ she thinks, _should’ve protected Jester, should’ve protected all of them._

But Jester’s so fucking _smart, always,_ and instead she just cries in front of everyone and tastes blood and knows that something is wrong.

Jester gets angry with her, and she’s trying to decide whether to say _hey, i finally got to see it_ or _are you breaking your promise_ when she falls backwards.

—

She wakes up in Rosohna, in their bed.

There’s a faint strain of Caduceus’s artificial sunlight that almost makes her think she can gauge what time it might be by looking out the window, but then she remembers.

Or, rather, she tries to roll out of bed to look out the window, fails miserably, and remembers as she takes ragged, gasping breaths into a pillow that it wouldn’t matter anyway.

She passes out again.

—

“—just don’t understand why she didn’t tell us she was sick! They said it’s really dangerous, and it was all this time, how could she not tell us? How could she not tell _me_?”

She wonders if Jester’s trying to wake her up by yelling. She can hear tears in her voice, shakes and tries not to open her eyes.

“Jester,” Caduceus says. “I don’t think she knew.”

—

“Beau.”

She doesn’t move.

“Beau? I know you’re awake, I can tell. Your breathing’s different. I know by now, you know.”

Both of Jester’s hands are around one of hers. She doesn’t open her eyes, just squeezes, and Jester squeezes back immediately.

Jester takes a deep breath. “Okay, I— we brought you back to see a doctor here, and they said you have, like, plants in your lungs. Caduceus hasn’t even heard of it, that’s how I knew it was bad, but apparently you can get it if—”

A sob tears through her voice and she stops completely. Beau can feel her shaking right down to where she’s still holding her hand, and opens her eyes.

Jester looks fucking miserable— she doesn’t think she’s seen her cry this much since she scried on Yasha, cheeks dark, eyes wild.

“You get it when people don’t love you enough.”

Oh.

She opens her mouth— to apologize, for being selfish, for all their love not being enough— but nothing really comes out.

Right.

Plants.

Jester would have cut her off anyway, she lets go of Beau’s hand and leans forward, gripping the sheets— “And I _told_ Fjord, I _told_ him _and_ Nott that they shouldn’t be so mean to you, and I said if Yasha doesn’t love you like you love her then she’s _stupid_ and missing out because you’re _perfect_ , Beau, really, _everyone_ should love you. I hate that they don’t, I don’t— I wish I could be enough.”

She keeps leaning forward, and Beau can see just how long she must have been crying— there are tears beading together under her chin, and soaking into the front and lap of her dress.

“They said it only happens like this if you’ve had it before, and I _hate_ that it must have been your mom and dad, I’m so sorry, I wish I’d just told you they didn’t deserve you instead of that you should forgive them, that’s what I _meant_ , they don’t deserve you and they shouldn’t be allowed to have a kid at _all_ if they did this to you, we’ll go back and get TJ as soon as you’re better and he can live with Momma and Yeza and Luc in the Chateau—” She finally pauses to breathe, wet things, gasping and desperate. “People should have loved you _your whole life_ , Beau. I love you _so much_ , you know, but I shouldn’t be the first one.”

She feels like she could say something, then, opens her mouth and almost immediately spits blood down the length of the bed.

“ _Oh, gods,_ oh gods, Beau, hang on,” and Jester runs out of the room, comes back in with a thin metal dish of some kind— “Here, it’s gonna be okay,” and she cries and rubs Beau’s back while she coughs, blood first, then leaves, petals, until she’s retching entire plants into the basin.

When she’s done, her chest feels empty, hollow like her lungs had been somewhere in there. She smiles at Jester, bloody and tired, and falls back against the pillows.

—

That night, Jester carries her into the bathroom down the hall and runs a bath.

(“I know it looks bad, Jester,” Caduceus says, tilting the basin and peering into it, “but this is actually a very good sign.”)

She knows it’s late because everyone’s in bed— they all ducked in, briefly, to smile watery smiles at the two of them and say they love Beau. It’s the first time for some of them but she doesn’t mind— but are asleep now, and the house is quiet except for the faucet and Jester humming.

Jester pulls a stool right up next to the big clawfoot tub while Beau gets in, sinks down and tips her head against the lip.

She watches Beau for a minute with big, dark eyes.

“It’s okay if you don’t know why— I know you didn’t even know you had this— but was it because I said I loved you? Why all the plants came loose?”

“Yeah,” she says, head still tilted back. She feels drowsy, still, heavy and warm, and Jester looks hopeful more than anything. “I think so.”

“Oh.”

Jester looks into her lap for a long moment, purple spreading across her face like wine on fabric. _So pretty, always so pretty,_ Beau thinks, and when Jester just blushes deeper she realizes she must have said it out loud.

Then, she looks up.

“Can I kiss you?”

“Yeah.”

Jester cries a little when she kisses her, shakes like she’s cold, except Beau know she doesn’t get cold. After a long moment, she pulls away and swipes at her eyes, strips down to just her smallclothes and climbs in and just holds Beau against her.

Water gets everywhere, but she doesn’t really think anyone will mind. Beau’s knees knock the sides of the tub when she sits up to crawl further into Jester’s lap, and they stay there for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello! this was originally a prompt that i just sat on for a while but if you send me one i might be quicker


End file.
